Harper Lee: she allowed readers to understand civil rights

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Had the American novelist Harper Lee’s deathbeen announced this time last year, many would have expressed mild surprise, and added that they thought she’d died much earlier. Nothing had been heard from her publicly for decades. She had written only one book, published in 1960. That book, To Kill a Mockingbird, would have been praised unconditionally.

Yet last summer, at the age of 89 and from the confines of an Alabama nursing home, Lee announced that she was pleased to allow the publication ofGo Set a Watchman, a book Lee wrote on her way to writing To Kill a Mockingbird, and was advised by her editor to alter. That book, which was clearly a very early work in progress, was greeted by consternation. Why, many wondered, had Lee chosen to risk sullying her reputation by making her drafts public? Had her lawyer, who had “discovered” the manuscript, taken advantage of her?

What else is there? Her death sets the scene for literary vultures.

Her death now invites two new questions, neither of which are likely to have pleased her. First, how much of her voice will reach us posthumously? Lee always said she wrote for herself, and it’s unlikely that she would have stopped just because she didn’t feel like publishing any of it. What else is there? We know, for instance, that she wrote wonderful letters. Did she burn her own papers? Will we ever know the terms of her will? Her death sets a scene for literary vultures.

The second question is one of talent. Instead of settling for the writer she was, we’re tempted to consider the writer she might have been. To Kill a Mockingbird is an excellent book; Go Set a Watchman is not. Was she a born novelist who chose to write only one novel? Or was she a person who became a writer by accident because she happened to have one good book in her? The cruelty of the question alone makes you wince.

In many ways, none of this matters. Had Lee written more books, the chances are they would have been much the same novel anyway. She said she aspired to become “the Jane Austen of south Alabama”; she would have revisited the same setting and similar circumstances.

Harper Lee pictured in 1961 with Mary Badham, the child actress who starred in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a MockingbirdCredit:
Everett Collection/REX

Go Set a Watchman does not alter the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird has all the qualities of a classic. It doesn’t diminish Lee’s achievement in taking a child’s point of view and giving it a lilting wit and narrative sophistication that allowed readers to understand civil rights from a unique angle.

What Go Set a Watchman does is help us understand what it took to get there – and it will do this even more in years to come, when the excitement over the supposed discovery of a whole new Harper Lee novel has died down. Go Set a Watchman is an angry, anxious book. Its adult heroine, a much closer alter-ego for its author than Mockingbird’s child-heroine Scout, is hysterical about the racism she sees all around her and full of fury towards her father, a racist Atticus Finch. One of the things it makes you wonder is which Lee needed more: an editor or a psychotherapist.

Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch and Mary Badham played Scout in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a MockingbirdCredit:
Rex Features

For Lee to have abandoned this position and replaced it with serene, soft-focus love for Atticus Finch, a character who would become one of the 20th century’s greatest moral heroes, was an extraordinary leap – not just of the pen but of the mind. It’s a great tribute to her.

And yet… Although Go Set a Watchman is too emotionally tangled and too poorly written to be any good, it makes you sorry that the tamer novel turned out to be better. What if, instead of saying, “Strip this back, make it simple, tell it through the eyes of a child,” Lee’s editor had encouraged her to wrestle for longer with the less palatable aspects of what she wanted to say? What if To Kill a Mockingbird had been a just little bit more complicated?

Well, it wouldn’t have been so much of a fairy tale; it wouldn’t have been taught in schools everywhere, and it probably wouldn’t even have been considered a classic. But it would have been a masterpiece.